Social processing of dynamic naturalistic social interactions

Research suggests that static depictions of social interactions preferentially capture our attention compared to non-interactions. Research also suggests that motion captures attention. To date, therefore, it is unknown whether dynamic social interactions preferentially capture attention relative to non-interactions, over and above motion cues. The present study captured 81 participants’ eye-gaze and facial movements when viewing 4-second video clips of social-interactions compared to motion-matched non-interactions. We hypothesised that participants would spend more time looking at the two people in the videos relative to the background when viewing social interactions compared to non-interactions. Results confirmed our hypothesis and demonstrated that this effect was stronger for individuals with greater empathy and lower autistic traits. These results add to the growing body of research investigating the processing of social interactions in complex, naturalistic stimuli and demonstrate that social interactions do preferentially capture attention, even when motion cues are present.